Want to Inspire Change? Learn the Art of Storytelling
Open rescue is one of the most powerful stories of them all.
This is Part 3 in a three part series on open rescue (one, two).
In the days following my first release from jail, I was worried I may have ruined my life.
I was part of a demonstration that exposed criminal fraud at a large industrial chicken farm that marketed itself as “free range” and “humane”. After entering the property, we found sick and starving birds who were unable to bring themselves to food and water.
We asked the authorities to conduct an investigation into the facility. Instead, they arrested me and fifty other advocates on multiple felony charges including theft and burglary.
I believed our actions were righteous, and even legal under state law. But would others — in a world where seemingly no one gives a second thought to what happens to the animals on their plates — see my actions similarly?
It turns out, I had no reason to fear.
After I was released from jail, my professors commended me for putting my social studies into practice and gave me extensions on exams.
My friends reached out to me (not the other way around!) to talk about factory farming and asking for advice on how they could find purpose in their own lives.
My family’s reaction was the most powerful. My parents drove several hours to see me following the arrests, and my mom said to me words I will never forget:
“With our son putting his freedom on the line, we cannot in good conscience continue to eat animals.”
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For most of my life, I thought it was a simple truth that people don’t care about animals — at least, not enough to talk about the cruelty involved in many of our meals.
But since I got involved with open rescue — a movement of people directly saving animals from abusive factory farms, slaughterhouses, and experimentation facilities — I’ve seen avoidance and dismissal turn into captivation and inspiration.
I’ve learned that the ways many of us have been taught to discuss factory farming is dead wrong. Often, we turn to “objective arguments”, i.e. the environment, health, ethics, et cetera.
But humans are emotional creatures. We share knowledge and understand the world through stories: tales of characters facing challenges and making choices to overcome them.
I’ve since come to understand the open rescue movement, almost above anything else, as a powerful story. It’s a story of people around the world walking right into places of violence and risking everything to protect the most vulnerable creatures on earth.
If we want to change hearts and minds, we should start not with arguments, but with stories.
Humans are emotional animals (that’s a good thing)
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman (who passed away this year) became a popular icon for his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. In it, he describes the two ways our brains process information.
System I thinking is quick and instinctive. This is the judgment when a smile tells you “Oh, I can trust this person,” or when your gut tells you this alleyway isn’t quite safe.
System II is slower, more methodical. It’s the rational, analytical part of your brain that helps you learn a new cooking recipe or multiply 16 by 7. It’s a step-by-step process that entails reflecting on our reasoning.
Both systems of thinking are valuable. If we only used analytical System II for all of our thinking, our brains would be constantly overwhelmed. (Imagine if you had to list out all the muscle movements in your hands and feet every time you walked to the grocery store.)
On the other hand, if we only used System I, we would never reflect on when our first impressions may be wrong — which Kahneman famously demonstrated that they so frequently are.
When we try to convince somebody of something new, we often get frustrated they’re “not being rational.” But rationality is not only the words we use in a discussion or argument. It involves the gut-feelings that evolution has ingrained in our brains and our bodies to make effective decisions in a complex world. It’s the intuition that tells us what motivates us and how to comfort a friend in distress.
Of course, our intuition can also very often be wrong. Challenging our unchecked social intuitions on the normality of factory farming requires changing both our factual beliefs and our emotional ones. To do that, we need tools that can effectively transform those emotions.
The Story of Open Rescue
A good story typically contains Three C’s: Character, Challenge, and Choice. In the case of an open rescue, that often involves:
a Character — an ordinary person who sees an animal in need;
a Choice — a decision to rescue that animal, despite the risks;
a Challenge — someone enduring jail and prosecution for helping her.
Part of the skill of storytelling is identifying real events that can be told as compelling stories. Open rescue is a natural platform for compelling storytelling because it features these elements — and perhaps most important of all here, the challenge of being prosecuted by corporations and a powerful government. As one open rescue advocate and investigator has told me, “the bigger the challenge, the better the story.”
What Rescue Stories Do for Animals
After years of getting used to people ignoring social issues involving animals, I’ve seen open rescue stories captivate, cut through, and inspire courage.
1. Captivate
When I started telling people in college that I was arrested for animals, people suddenly started to pay attention. They became curious, wanting to hear more about what could be worth risking my future career for — and what kind of cruelty a nationally reputable “organic” farm could possibly be doing to their animals.
Stories captivate in a world that is constantly competing for our attention. There are over 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute. But not all of it goes viral. Jonah Berger, a viral marketing guru at the University of Pennsylvania, writes that social media content is far more likely to go viral if it contains a compelling story.
Open rescue has proven to be a powerful story on social media. Videos about the #SonomaRescueTrial regularly received millions of views. And a story published by The Intercept about an FBI manhunt for two piglets rescued from the world’s largest pig factory farm became the most widely shared article then in the media outlet’s history.
2. Cut through
Not everything that catches attention changes minds. Good stories not only captivate, but also cut through emotional barriers that often prevent us from openly supporting a cause.
Research from LGBTQ+ advocacy has shown that door-to-door storytelling is one of the few effective ways to get people to change their voting behavior. They engage the parts of our brains that can imagine what it is like to be someone else — to feel their motivations and their struggles — and thereby sympathize with them.
Often, social problems feel so big that they will never be solved. They make us feel a sense of futility — “This is a huge problem, and no one cares.” Stories like ones of open rescue show that there are people who care, and are willing to sacrifice to make change.
In the case of open rescue, they also reframe the central issue in a way that seems more solvable. By challenging the legal system, open rescuers can shift the question of how to end factory farming away from “How do we get everyone to go vegan?” to “How can we pass laws to better protect animals?”
3. Courage
Stories inspire the courage that advocates need to drive systemic change. And open rescue storytelling has already created political change for animals.
In 2018, advocates with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) approached Katy Tang, a member of the powerful San Francisco board of supervisors, with the FBI story on the rescue of Lily and Lizzie. Katy Tang was inspired by the story, saying that she wanted to do something for animals. She later spearheaded the passage of the San Francisco fur ban. A year later, California followed the city’s lead to become the first state in the nation to outright ban the sale and manufacture of fur.
Interestingly, that fur ban was somewhat unrelated to the story that inspired it (pigs don’t have fur!). But the story of rescuing animals from factory farms is so compelling that it inspired Supervisor Tang to ask what else she can do for animals.
Now, DxE is on a path to banning factory farming in one of the most powerful ag counties in California. The group succeeded recently in qualifying a ballot measure to ban factory farms in Sonoma County. This was only possible through gathering over 30,000 signatures with over 150 highly motivated volunteers.
Several of these volunteers are themselves facing felony charges for open rescue investigations in Sonoma County. I imagine that many members of the broader group feel extra motivated to talk to voters knowing that their fellow signature gatherers have taken risks to help animals from the very factory farms they are advocating to ban.
You can tell stories that change the world
Nowadays, I often mention in casual conversation that I have been involved in open rescue. That often looks like one of the following:
I mention it’s “what I do for work”, i.e. co-founding a nonprofit for open rescue advocacy;
People ask me why I’m vegan / vegetarian, and I say I’ve been involved with groups that do open rescue investigations;
When the mood is right at parties, I say my “fun fact” is I’ve been arrested for animals.
What I’ve found surprising is that people are often moved by these stories even when I tell them in a way that minimizes my personal connection to it. I sometimes say that I have friends who do open rescue without mentioning that I’ve been involved in my own demonstrations.
As a reader of this blog, you can say you have been following the open rescue movement, and (if true) that they have moved you to rethink how society should relate to animals. You can ask friends and family if they’ve heard of these open rescue cases, and what they think of them.
What I envision in the coming decades is a mass movement of open rescue advocacy: one that includes not only the animals and the rescuers, but of ordinary people telling these stories to their friends and family. I imagine statewide ballot initiatives across the nation motivated in part by stories of risk and rescue.
We can create a world that ends systemic violence against animals. And through your own storytelling, you can help make that world a reality.
This is the last post in a three part series (one, two) on open rescue.
Very heartening. These are the stories people need to hear in order to cut through the natural complacency and disregard that accompanies a lifetime of habit, social indoctrination, and industry propaganda and secrecy.
Thanks for what you do, Dean, and for sharing this powerful story telling technique.